Rochester Knockings

by Hubert Haddad

  “She’s not dead!” Kate exclaimed without thinking, in a voice that was just a breath.

  The old man’s glasses fogged up. He caught his breath and, pivoting slowly on his heels, playfully addressed the person approaching, his hands crossed behind his back, leaning forward like a skater on the parquet floor.

  “Ah, there you are! ‘The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.’ Wasn’t it you who wrote that? Well then you cannot help but be understood by this child of light . . .”

  The director of the New-York Tribune headed off toward other civilities, leaving Ralph Waldo Emerson to consider with an amused eye the woman who came over to be presented in a whirlwind and before whom he didn’t know what to say. It was indeed one of the Fox sisters, those mad, gentle girls capable of apprehending in its own individuality the genius of a dead butterfly! The ashen face of his son, snatched from the world twenty years earlier by scarlet fever, superimposed itself onto that of the young girl. Memory, that’s the eyes’ daily bread!

  Kate for her part was timid and unsteady on her feet under the attentive eyes of the man of letters, whom she had read, pencil in hand, under the advice of her mentor. “Every soul is a heavenly Venus for every other soul”—he’d thought of them, those hardly intelligible and so deeply moving words? Did he really imagine that there was a single and unique Oversoul in all the universe from which each creature received a reflection or a wound? He looked like a great hieratic bird with the beaked nose of a hornbill. Beyond a nice smile of abnegation, his silver eyes stared at her so profoundly to the point that the anodyne woman’s self-awareness helplessly dissolved.

  While the shouts of voices and laughter multiplied around them, a lady interrupted this silent vis-à-vis.

  “Mr. Emerson, you who are our Goethe, what credit do you accord to these stories about mediums?”

  Kate didn’t have time to hear the response. She watched the couple move away into the hubbub. Other famous figures, or those who enjoyed coming across as so, accosted her for a friendly conversation, a compliment, or a dig—but she appreciated not being the center of attention, just a low-level curiosity like that elegant man with an ivory cane or of this adventuress known for improvising her way, depending on the circumstance, as a medium, actress, or businesswoman and who was pressed close against a rich entrepreneur of the railroad and maritime industry nicknamed the Commodore. This woman presented herself frankly to Kate.

  “I am Victoria Woodhull, my name will perhaps mean nothing to you. But I find it overwhelming to approach you. We are many in America who owe you an eternal gratitude. It’s your example that we all follow on the path of spiritualism . . . Isn’t that right, Cornelius . . .?” she added.

  “Look who’s coming in!” the entrepreneur cried out without listening, his arm around her waist.

  A clamor arose in the rooms. The guests clapped their hands, moving toward the newcomer. Kate, motionless by the fireplace, recognized without real surprise the wavy mane of the Lion of Anacostia. Where else would an activist on tour like Frederick Douglass finish his day’s tribune than at the home of the most influential reformist in New York? A lively exchange was heard where words like liberty, rights, and equality rang out.

  Then, imagining herself forgotten, thinking of rejoining Miss Helen back in the office, another individual appeared as if engendered from a dream and addressed her in a flat voice.

  “Kate, do you remember me?”

  The young woman paled, brought back to some unplaceable time. But she pulled herself together, certain she did not know this stooped man with dull eyes and sickly skin, who seemed to have mustered a Herculean effort to approach her.

  “No,” he said, “you do not remember me. I am Charles Livermore, New York financier. You have before you a desperate man. I need your help. You are my final hope . . .”

  Cheers rang out around Frederick Douglass. The brilliant speech of the former slave drowned out the whispered confidences of the banker.

  “Once you let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny he has earned the right to citizenship . . .”

  Kate promised whatever was wanted by the banker and escaped to the stairs, taken with the impression of imminent danger beyond anything she could dread in this world. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” she repeated to herself, subtly terrorized by the idea that something bad could have happened to Margaret. Entering the kitchen, she discovered with disbelief Miss Helen, seated on a bench, legs splayed, drinking a strong whiskey in front of the enormous stoves.

  “Oh, I’m so happy!” Kate cried out from far enough away to allow her chaperone time to regain composure.

  “And by what good fortune?” stammered Miss Helen, gathering up her skirts.

  “I spoke with Emerson, imagine that!”

  While the good woman showed her ignorance with a dignified silence, Kate went on to recite with pressing eloquence:

  Far or forgot to me is near;

  Shadow and sunlight are the same;

  The vanished gods to me appear;

  And one to me are shame and fame.

  Part Three

  New York

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  —William Butler Yeats

  I.

  Recent Disagreements

  As a consequence of the election of Abraham Lincoln, who promised the abolition of slavery left in abeyance since the 1820 Missouri Compromise, South Carolina’s secession precipitated a national divide in a matter of weeks. In New York as in Rochester, one watched with a sort of stupefied amazement the escalation of events that could only mean a general uprising was on the horizon.

  No one had yet experienced the battle of Bull Run, in July 1861—three months after the overall benign confrontation at Fort Sumter at the origin of hostilities—but it was definitely war. Convinced of the superiority of the Loyalists and even more of the efficacy of industry at the Union’s service, the brand new Republican President flanked by two young telegraphists launching his orders, firmly incited a staff of armed forces hardly familiar with such grand military maneuvers.

  It all began with disappointment. In position after an exhausting night march, it was in front of the political and financial elite of Washington, come to watch on lawn chairs the announced defeat of the rebels, that the Yankee troops led by General Irwin McDowell surrounded, not without panache, the area of Bull Run. But the skirmish at Blackburn’s Ford improvised by senior officer James Longstreet quickly turned into a fiasco, with a hundred killed and more wounded. After some uncertain exchanges with swords drawn, the Confederate Generals Beauregard and Johnston, veterans of the Mexican War, supported by the Virginia brigade of Colonel Thomas J. Jackson, under the imperious command of Generalissimo Robert E. Lee, rushed in to defeat the enemy camps, tearing off the foot of an eighty-year old widow who couldn’t leave her bed in the process. All of this happened over the course of a few hours around a hill and a stone bridge. Following this panicked start that had had the worst outcome, McDowell’s undermined forces retreated to the outskirts of the capital, on the other side of the Potomac, leaving a crowd of prisoners behind. At the Executive Mansion in Washington, which had just missed falling into enemy hands in this first real battle, it was clear that the war was just beginning and would require important sacrifices in material and in men. The subject of riots in New York, a presidential decree soon launched the mobilization of half a million citizens. Hardly a year later, there were victims in the tens of thousands on both sides of the fluctuating line of the front.

  The missionary Alexander Cruik, who had volunteered as a chaplain in spite of being banished by his congregation for his measured defense of spiritualism, experienced hell every day on the front lines and in the country hospitals, where young men’s limbs were being amputated, having been shattered by bullets coming from grooved musket barr
els, the recent invention of a French gunsmith. In the middle of pitched battles, even at the risk of being taken as a target, the evangelist wandered like a harvester of souls in the bloody fields where the dying moaned, wandering from a Southerner with a blown-open stomach to a dismembered Unionist. Obsessed by the abomination of mass murder without offense or insult, he saw the disadvantages and defeats of his side facing the Confederates, who were inferior in number but fiercely defending their territory under the banner of aristocratic officers. When Lincoln had resumed the offensive by proclaiming the emancipation of slaves long before the hour of victory, thereby increasing the war effort tenfold through the mass conscription of Blacks and the intensive use of rail and water transport of troops, the horror of the battlefield also found itself multiplied. Armed only with his faith, carrying only his word or his silence, Alexander Cruik could no longer tell what was at stake in all this carnage. How could he find any difference between a massacre displaying Yankee prowess and a mass grave in honor of a generalissimo? In the snow or the mud, uniforms were too torn and stained to recognize which side they belonged to. Therefore, between two dying adolescents, was it necessary to tend to one first before the other? Were their souls brothers or enemies at the moment their armor of passions and identities dropped away?

  During the move from one position to another, with the cavalry and artillery wagons preceding the advancing infantry battalions, the wounded at the back letting out cries and moans, Alexander Cruik believed he was watching the dead walking in dense rows and kept hearing the wild screams from the attacks. They all called for their mothers, those who fell. Children were playing at killing each other and believed they were only playing. At Chancellorsville, after four days of shelling and bayonets, the army of the Potomac suffered such setbacks that Cruik saw a band of defeated Yankees lynch one of their own because he was black and therefore the cause of the war. General Robert Edward Lee, in triumph, then pushed his cavalry of apocalypse up to Pennsylvania. Uninformed by the military advisors, the disoriented infantrymen grasped little of these advances and setbacks, other than from the hoarseness of the bugles after the fighting.

  Cruik, who had witnessed the consolidation of the North under the leadership of General Grant, no longer reacted as he watched the Confederate troops, now on the offensive, plow the front line with artillery between two hills south of Gettysburg. Considering the sky-blue uniforms of those on the lookout, he couldn’t help but speculate on the survival or imminent death of such and such recruit nearby who, for the moment, was squinting his eyes at the enigma of the horizon, one of them gently touching his ear and the other smiling at some dreamed-of face—all of them on the edge of the abyss, so full of slender eternities.

  But there was a shudder, and sighs spread out at the sight of those enigmatic flickers quickly surrounding Little Round Top, countless, on the front line of enemy guns. Rather than giving command to use the artillery, head of the Maine regiment Colonel Chamberlain and his counterparts from New York State ordered their troops to charge. Hidden behind the 48- and 64-pound howitzers, which had been shipped to them by rail and which the bomb blasters surveyed with a rogue tenderness, Alexander had the feeling he was participating by his trembling in every limb at the immense devastation being committed, from this distance similar to a game of colored figurines. A great clamor swept by winds from the west swirled through the hills, where muskets and repeating rifles crackled while artillery sporadically thundered with a kind of phlegm. Already, stretcher-bearers on duty and fellow soldiers brought back the first of the torn-up to the tents. From his point of view overlooking the hills, Alexander discovered beyond this monstrous duel of bayonets, a multitude of other engagements as far as the eye could see, where cavalry and footmen were intertwined in dust raised from the force of their impacts. Called in by a nurse, her arms red with blood, he entered the ward of the field hospital, the odor of chloroform and entrails seizing his throat. At the bedside of a mortally wounded Negro calling for Christ’s help, he began to entreat the unknown powers to come to his aid. Astonished on the brink of his dying, the man had the time to tell him, vomiting his guts, that he wanted only for his name, Ben Crosby, to be written on a piece of paper and pinned to his shirt. Seeing him do that, a wounded man in a bed nearby, who was about to be amputated, asked the same favor in a low voice, adding the name of his village. “Gangrene will set in,” he said, “and I will only get the common grave.” A young woman in a smock who was assisting the surgeon at work on another pallet had turned toward him a worried face, of a feverish beauty. He smiled at her desperately and rushed out of the tent.

  Guns and howitzers now thundered forth over a crackling of muskets and one could see here and there, without a plausible link to these sustained shots, fallen groups of soldiers or spurts of earth and stone carrying numerous puppets blown to pieces. The fighting shook the most beautiful slopes under the impeccable azure. A lark shrilled, inaudible. Alexander Cruik remembered the hidden miracles of sight and speech. He raised his head toward the bird perched on its summit and cried out, his eyes filled with tears: “Don’t prophesy! One mustn’t prophesy such things!” Although half destroyed, the Union battalions were at this moment retreating in good alignment to their outposts while the dislocated enemy columns ebbed in disorder beyond their positions, leaving room for a few scattered soldiers who, severely shocked by the intensity of the charge, were still firing in isolation, unable to come to their senses. A non-commissioned officer with flaming hair, face pockmarked, his uniform stained with blood, appeared suddenly before him like a handsome devil, bayonet high, staring perplexedly at him in passing. Those in his company followed him with heads down so as not to count the missing comrades.

  With the steps of a sleepwalker, despite the calls from the returning sergeant, Alexander rushed toward the deserted battlefield that the relief workers, waiting for the signal of a truce, had not yet entered. As he stepped into the open field, imploring God’s mercy, his dark silhouette stretching over a pile of corpses, a Southerner wounded in the legs and head, thinking he saw a vulture circling above him, had the strength to lift his musket and shoot before rendering up his own soul. Hit in the chest, Alexander Cruik fell to his knees, hands on the ground, face to face with his murderer. He thought to himself that this dead man resembled him like a brother. Sobbing for the first time since he was a small child, he kissed that bloody face full on the mouth.

  The sergeant had observed the scene from the shelter of a cannon breach. After a moment of disbelief, he stepped over the fascines and tangled remains, crouched down, and came quickly to join him.

  “It’s not worth it anymore,” said the chaplain.

  “I recognize you,” William Pill cried out. “You are the evangelist of the Redskins, the friend of the Fox sisters!”

  The officer raised Cruik’s head up off the ground to moisten his lips with his alcohol flask. “It’s going to be all right,” he said, “I’ll take you back . . .”

  “Useless, you’d just be bringing back a corpse. I remember you too,” the chaplain added, leaning on one elbow. “But come closer. I have loved only one woman in my life. We could have done such great things, she and I . . . Listen: I’m wearing an amulet of no monetary value around my neck. Promise me to give it to Kate Fox. It came to me on the day my mother was killed by the Cherokees, right before my eyes. We had been heading west like so many others. The Indians discovered me at the bottom of the carriage, but they didn’t hurt me. Before abandoning me to my kind they tied this amulet around my neck, I don’t know why. It has never left me . . .”

  William Pill brought the cadaver back anyway. And it was in front of a witness, recording the last will of the chaplain Alexander Cruik, that he pocketed the iron chain and amulet.

  In the meadows and hills battered with the holes of shells, where disemboweled horses rotted in the sun, tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides lay who hadn’t had the time to write their names and addresses on a scrap of paper. Mass grave
s were dug throughout. Faced with such carnage, the governor of Pennsylvania subsidized a sanitation committee for the site as well as the construction of a cemetery. However, the battle of Gettysburg gave the advantage to the Unionists and Sergeant William Pill, taking his chances at each new engagement, won his lieutenant’s stripes there. The front line delimiting the warring territories moved like a snake in its cage for months, from one region or state to the other: no victory brought about a truce and the two camps were by now tallying their martyrs in the hundreds of thousands. In April of 1865, President Lincoln who, thanks to the war effort, had raised the Union to the status of industrial power, was finally and triumphantly able to enter Richmond, the capital of the Confederates that General Grant, his chief of staff, had just conquered.

  With one finger on his left hand blown off by a Minié ball, his chest slashed by a bayonet, and having miraculously survived a fire provoked by a famous general enthusiastic about scorched earth, William Pill left his uniform without regret. Not an hour of his life since his recruitment in the first months of the conflict had passed without his thinking of Pearl Gascoigne. Despite his ordeals, the Union’s victory mattered less to him than the possibility of seeing Pearl again. He had watched his companions die fighting, and himself had killed without fail, carried by a single thought: of one day seeing again the woman he loved more than God or America. Pearl, however, had left him, she’d betrayed him for a chimera, a figment of the imagination, the worst of insanities: to be a free woman, to write books, to be accomplished.

  Barely off the train, Pill reclaimed his American Quarter Horse from a breeder in Monroe County to whom he’d entrusted it three years earlier. The animal had also aged, but still turned on itself like clockwork, and it was at a gallop that the demobilized lieutenant headed back to Rochester, determined to forget the recent troubles and grumbling, unable to get out of his mind an air that the black recruits loved to hum in hoarse voices before the fight: